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Reviews
Mapping Identity: The Creation of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation, 1805–1902
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By Laura Woodworth-Ney
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University Press of Colorado, Boulder, 2004. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 243 pages. $31.95 cloth.
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Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane: The World of the Schitsu'umsh (Coeur d'Alene Indians)
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By Rodney Frey, in collaboration with the Schitsu'umsh
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 341 pages. $40.00 cloth. $22.50 paper.
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Reviewed by Richmond L. Clow
University of Montana, Missoula
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| These two works focus on the landscape and identity of the Schitsu'umsh and outsiders who mapped the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in Idaho. Laura Woodworth-Ney narrates the Coeur d'Alenes' story of preserving most of their pre-reservation lands in their contemporary reservation. As reservation boundaries were drawn and redrawn, outsiders created and recreated new Coeur d'Alene identities to describe their tribal neighbors. In contrast, Rodney Frey examines the complex social relationships the Coeur d'Alene created with both their historic and contemporary landscapes. He examines social relationship people forged among themselves, their culture, and their landscape in the past and the successes and difficulties of maintaining those social ties to the landscape today. |
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Employing an ethnographic format, Frey interviewed consultants, observed tribal ceremonies, and searched historical documents to re-create the landscape Crane and Coyote created for the Schitsu'umsh in preparation for the arrival of "the ones that were found here" (p. 3). The people embedded cultural beliefs in their landscape through land-use patterns and rituals. Of all the Schitsu'umsh ceremonies, the Jump Dance is the most important, because it renews the people's identities and relationships to their territory and the resources located there — two points that require a more powerful emphasis than Frey provides. |
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Woodworth-Ney confines the Coeur d'Alene historic past to the nineteenth-century, focusing on differing outsiders' perceptions of the Coeur d'Alene identity. She examines outsiders' impressions of the Schitsu'umsh, beginning with traders who called them Coeur d'Alene, "tough hearts," because they were savvy traders. Then the Jesuits entered their world and encouraged a small group to build farms and move into the regional economy. Local whites called this group civilized. |
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The Schitsu'umsh existed without a treaty-defined reservation until 1873, when President Ulysses Grant created the Coeur d'Alene Executive Order Reservation along the western border of the northern Idaho Territory. Borders did not stop trespassers. Lumber interests and mining ventures wanted the reservation borders diminished so they could appropriate the reservation's logs and metals. |
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Both authors elaborate on the importance of Andrew Seltice's leadership. With Jesuit support, Seltice defended the reservation boundaries against late nineteenth-century encroachment that culminated in modifying the reservation boundaries in 1889. According to Frey, industrial ventures created a polluted tribal landscape that was unable to provide for the tribe's sustenance. This both created economic dependency on whites and increased reservation poverty. Woodward-Ney argues that reservation boundaries on white-generated maps revealed whites' perceptions of the Schitsu'umsh as civilized. |
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In evaluating tribal identity, Woodward-Ney describes outsiders' assessments of Schitsu'umsh identity, but overlooks the Schitsu'umsh's perceptions of themselves. Accepting the Jesuits' civilization claims suggests the need for greater inquiry. Were the Coeur d'Alene only appearing to be civilized to gain outside support for their reservation land claims? If so, they were not assimilated and disguised their identity by outwardly appearing civilized. Whether the civilization was real or imagined, outsiders called them civilized and assisted them in preserving their territory. To determine whether Andrew Seltice and his followers were actually assimilated as Catholics or not requires the deeper discussion of identity provided by Frey, who describes the ongoing Coeur d'Alene belief in an animate landscape. This begs the question of just how deep conversion was among the Coeur d'Alene. If they looked civilized, Frey argues, it was a tactic that protected both their land and their philosophical views on the world Coyote and Crane had created and that had served them well from time immemorial. |
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Although Frey brings Coeur d'Alene landscape relationships to the present, he assumes that the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act made them citizens. Contrary to that fable, many Coeur d'Alene became citizens when they received fee patents to their allotments and subsequently lost them under mixed-blood forced-fee patent orders during World War I. Since degree of blood was not a valid reason to violate the twenty-five-year trust period, the Department of Justice initiated a lawsuit, United States v. Benewah County, in the early 1920s to revoke these illegal patents. Though Woodworth-Ney ended her study before the Benewah case, it is interesting to speculate what she might have discovered about white perceptions and identity when "civilized" Schitsu'umsh refused to pay county real estate taxes. |
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Taken together, these two readable narratives are reliable stories of people, their physical environment, and their identity tied to that landscape. Both studies should find their way into the hands of anyone who is interested in Coeur d'Alene history and culture and the larger stories they tell about ethnicity and identity. They are informative stories that together describe a complex mutual history from a small place in northwest Idaho that has big stories to tell. |
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